Rapid(s) Fire Thoughts
A potpourri of questions and thoughts from the last few weeks of the Colorado Rapids.
I don’t really have a fully formed and compelling article on the ‘Pids at this stage of the season. I thought they’d be a mid-table, edge of the playoffs team, and they are. Six wins, four draws, six losses, sitting 8th out of 15 in the table. Nobody wants me to write a thousand words about why I was right. That doesn’t seem to bother Nate Silver, though. Zing!
So here’s a bunch of random thoughts and observations. Enjoy. Or perhaps ‘I’m sorry.’
Where would we be without Djordje?
Mr. Mihailovic has 7 goals and 2 assists; a combined total that far outstrips anyone else on the squad (Rafa Navarro has 6). Game in and game out, he tears through the midfield on the dribble or puts away a critical goal in a tough spot. I give the gif treatment to two of my favorites.
One: Djordje sees there’s nobody lying down behind the wall, so he goes under it (!) to pull out a draw against the always-tough-to-beat Seattle Sounders.
Two: Mihailovic’s awesome solo excursion through the Portland midfield in last week’s 2-1 loss for the ‘Pids only goal. What a romp - from collecting the loose ball from a teammate’s tackle to the back of the net, this was poetry.
Colorado still lost that game. But to date, Djordje has 3 goals from the run of play, that one free kick above, and 2 assists; in addition to 3 PK goals. And it’s not just counting stats: his advanced metrics are phenomenal too. He’s rocking a +1.97 Goals Added, best on the team, meaning he draws opponents on dribbles that free up his teammates, and he’s often the pass before the pass that becomes a goal. Both the eyes and the numbers tell you that on the ball, he’s regularly the team’s most potent force. Without him and those first two incredible months of Zack Steffen, this team is dog poop.
What a weird soccer summer this will be
The USMNT just finished dual losses against Türkye1 and Switzerland. Yes it was our C-team due to injury, but these games weren’t particularly close, nor were Sam’s Boys particularly good. Now the US is playing in the Gold Cup, without Christian Pulisic, who wants a rest. And the only thing at stake seems to be whether we fire Mauricio Pochettino and replace him, again, with Bruce Arena. This is weird. This is weird because we come to count on the summers as ‘international break time’ when we can revel in some semi-meaningful soccer of a different variety. But there’s no Euros, and no World Cup, and no Copa America. There’s just this sorta stupid Gold Cup where the US team’s opening group is Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Saudi Arabia. And to be honest, with the way the US is playing, they might not make it out of the group.
We also have an expanded Club World Cup, which is a weird event, and always has been. The FIFA World Cup has tremendous parity. For all its faults, so does the UEFA Champions League. Even Concacaf Champions Cup, despite some flaws (like the frequent and regular food poisoning of US teams that play in Mexico) is a close-ish competition. The Club World Cup, generally, has always been one giant team laying waste to a bunch of minnows. It also never used to BE a summer tournament. Weird.
The Club World Cup has historically been played in December, and in the past was a competition where Al Hayyat in Morocco and Kashima Antlers of Japan and some team in Kazakhstan played each other at 1 am EST for the chance to lose 10-0 to Real Madrid. Now, they’ve expanded the tournament so that Botafogo and Seattle Sounders … can lose 10-0 to PSG AND Liverpool in a SERIES of matches, and during regular prime time hours, and in summer. Additionally, the matches will take place in the US … but because it’s FIFA, I assume that a ticket will cost me $150 for nosebleed seats. I can’t even raise the energy to submit a press request for a match in Washington DC because … I don’t really care about Al Ain vs Juventus? Or Salzburg and Al Hilal? Or Wydad playing Al Ain2? And if I don’t really care, why would any other soccer fan?
The idea to expand the tournament at all and move it to the US was obviously a massive cash grab, and that’s crass, and that’s a turn off for me. I don’t being used. In addition, a summer soccer tournament is a tough sell for me because so many teams will rest their exhausted players – I’m not even going to see PSG or Manchester City’s best players. And player exhaustion carries separate concerns: the lack of rest for soccer clubs and players globally would be a huge moral issue if it weren’t for the piles and piles of cash the players earn – instead it’s only a modest issue of trying to figure out, as a team, how many minutes a human body can play in 365 days before it breaks.
Will I watch? For sure - if soccer’s on, I will watch it. Last week I tuned in a Mexico-Japan U20 game last week, because, in the words of Edmund Hillary, it was there. But will I care? Probably not. And ‘hey we’re creating more soccer but the games are mostly meaningless’ is a worrisome trend. Because later on this summer we will have …
… Leagues Cup! Unlike the FIFA Club World Cup which is a meaningless tournament that is effectively in its first year, Leagues Cup is a meaningless tournament invented two years ago. A rich history! The format for this year has changed: there’s a league-table round (like UEFA Champions League) and it sort of makes sense?
Leagues Cup might be of interest to Colorado fans because the ‘Pids made such a stunning run through the 2024 Leagues Cup. Because Colorado’s run of form lately hasn’t been great, and because the tournament is arguably harder to win than MLS Cup, and because Colorado hasn’t won any trophies in 15 years, it feels like an exercise in futility for the ‘Pids.
What I’m saying is: there will be a ton of soccer this summer. But mostly, our favorite teams, the USMNT and the Colorado Rapids, won’t really be substantive participants. Maybe I’m wrong! Maybe Potch and the boys will tear things up! Maybe Colorado will make the unlikely run! Maybe the Mamelodi Sundowns3 will upset PSG in the Club World Cup Final on Sunday, July 13! And more importantly, maybe all the big stars will play their hardest in these matches!
As you can tell though, I have reservations, and that makes for a weird summer.
Why did they get Israeli Centerback Stav Lempkin?
It is fascinating to me that the brain trust of Fran Taylor, Brian Crookham, and Pádraig Smith (the Rapids Front Office guys) looked at the problems of this team and said ‘let’s get a centerback.’ It’s not necessarily a bad conclusion - just a surprising one.
In late 2024 Colorado added a fullback (Reggie Cannon) to the club to eventually overtake Keegan Rosenberry on the depth chart. In 2025 they added a centerback (Chidozie Awaziem) to replace Moïse Bombito, and Jackson Travis overtook Sam Vines at starting LB. They also added Josh Atencio and unloaded Omar Fernandez; added Ted Ku-DiPietro and benched Kevin Cábral.
The assumption I suppose they’re making, based on all these moves, is ‘we’re a few pieces away from the right mix. Striker and attacking mid are squared away. We spent the winter fixing the fullbacks and the central midfielders. Zack Steffen is the real deal this year. We just need one fullback, and everything’s coming up roses for me and for you!’4
I’m nervous this is a bad bet. I don’t love Andreas Maxsø. But I don’t think shipping him back to Scandinavia will make us much better, no matter how good Lempkin is.
Because I don’t think the main problem is at centerback. It’s … at fullback and in the midfield.
Here’s the Goals Added numbers on the Rapids for 2025 to date.
Sam Bassett and Ollie Larraz have 1700 minutes and some truly dire Passing G+ stats: -0.42 and -0.46, respectively. Those numbers are not offset by good Dribbling, Interrupting, or Fouling numbers. Jackson Travis and Reggie Cannon also have terrible G+ numbers: totals of -0.51 for Travis and -0.64 for Cannon. Interrupting (tackles, interceptions, and recoveries) is the main culprit again.
Now, there’s a world where you look at this and say ‘these guys will all be better if there’s a good centerback near them to receive and interrupt.’ My conclusion, though, is that Colorado need a good fullback and a good defensive midfielder more than they need a good centerback.
That said, that move may be coming – the Lempkin addition might just be one piece of the puzzle. But IF they did go get a fullback, it’d been a demonstration that the Reggie Cannon less than a year ago was a mistake. And instead the Rapids may still be in the wait-and-see period.
Another possible conclusion based on the G+ data is that since Maxsø has a +0.15 G+ and an Interrupting G+ of +0.37, he’s not the centerback that Stav Lempkin will be replacing. Instead Chris Armas will be benching Chidozie Awaziem, with his -0.11 G+ and -0.51 Passing G+. That ALSO strikes me as weird, because Awaziem has only just been signed to start the winter. So maybe Lemkin replaces Awaziem, and maybe that does improve the Rapids. But then, what do they do with Chidozie?
There’s a third school of thought here, which is that some of this data is premature. That we need a few more months with Jackson Travis and Ted Ku-DiPietro and even Sam Bassett to see what they can really do. I really don’t know.
And here’s a fourth option regarding what the hell the Rapids are planning with this Stav Lempkin signing: on the podcast this week, Matt and I proposed the idea that acquiring Stav Lempkin means Colorado will go to a three-at-the-back formation – either a 5-3-2 or a 3-4-3.5 And there are reasons to believe that a system that frees fullbacks up to be more attacking would be good for this team.
All said, I still worry that the team’s most important areas to address are fullback, midfield, and a wide attacker, and Stav Lempkin ain’t any of those. But maybe another move is coming.
A Parting Rapid(s) Fire Thought
I pulled up the advanced metrics knowing that they illustrate the Rapids have been bad in midfield and at fullback this year. I did not expect those above G+ charts to reveal that Sam Vines and Josh Atencio have been quite good this year.
This makes me curious as to why Vines hasn’t seized the starting left back job from Jackson Travis, or why Chris Armas likes Travis despite some really questionable Interrupting and Fouling G+ numbers.
Atencio makes neat and tidy short passes and he’s very tough to get past - these are things that I had observed up till now, but never watched for. So now, I will. I’m excited by this new soccer-watching development. Four months into the season, and I know what to expect with Josh Atencio, and what I expect is pretty darn good.
That’s a fun part of watching the Rapids from June onward. As a fan at the start of the season and it’s like walking into an abstract expressionist gallery in Berlin: you look at the paintings and go ‘what the ever-living fuck am I seeing here?’ By midsummer, it’s concrete and understandable. And at that point we get to say ‘I know what the artist is doing’. We still have yet to really know, though, if the painting is any good. That’s still to be determined.
This is the new preferred global spelling, just like when Ivory Coast became Côte D’Ivoire. I’m simultaneously annoyed and thrilled. Annoyed because I don’t know what those squigglies over the U or the O are, and learning new names and pronunciations is extra work. Thrilled because, lets be honest, the anglification of the proper names of other countries has never made sense. ‘Oh you call your country Deutschland?’ YOU’RE GERMANY TO US.’ ‘You call this place España? TOO HARD TO PRONOUNCE WE CALL IT SPAIN.’ Literally ever city in Italy has a DIFFERENT name to Americans, and that’s incredibly stupid.
I also am not sure where Al Ain is from. I think Saudi Arabia. I could google search it. But ‘I’m going to drive 7 hours round trip to watch a team I had to google’ automatically makes me not want to google it. I can just go to a Riverhounds game. It’s 10 minutes from my house. And, in the inimitable words of Homer Simpson, “Nachos are nachos.”
It is strange to me that the Club World Club is being billed as ‘the top tournament on earth in human history’ and yet literally I’d never heard of the Mamelodi Sundowns until now.
My wife made me watch the Tony’s, and Audra' McDonald’s performance was, no joke, one of the most incredible ‘leave it all out there’ performances I have ever seen. Does she do this eight times a week? Because if so, pay her all the dollars for all the years. Hell, make HER the starting centerback for the Rapids.
This might have solely been my idea. But by spinning it in writing as both of our ideas, perhaps if it turns out to be wrong I will only own 50% of the blame.
Have you ended up watching much CWC or Gold Cup? You mentioned the Gold Cup final on HTHL, not CWC games.